Love, Baltimore
by K9Lasko
Summary: What the hell is he doing here? An on-going collection of flash fiction.
1. Eff You

**WARNING: **Lots of swearing.

**About this collection:**

These are stand-alone flash fiction pieces set mostly pre-NCIS in Baltimore. Each story has three random words as a prompt. I'll be adding off and on, semi-regularly. This collection is rated M for language, violence, maybe even sex. Who knows what might happen.

**Prompt words:** mistrial, tempt, breaking point.

* * *

**Fuck you  
****Love, Baltimore**

A mistrial.

It was fucking ridiculous. This entire city was fucking ridiculous. The evidence was there. The testimony, too. The two state's witnesses hadn't recanted, for once. They'd showed up, done their part to put away a killer. One killer. One of many responsible for yet another dead body shot up once, twice, three times. However fucking many times, it didn't seem to matter. It was always a gun.

Except everything fell apart. The jury had waffled. They couldn't decide. The evidence had been there, but it had been fucked up. He had to admit that. It wasn't perfect, okay? It was never perfect, or easy. This city was too much. It couldn't even help itself. The system was rigged to fail.

Convicting one killer was like pissing into an ocean. Policing those neighborhoods... it was a fucking war that no one would ever win.

It wasn't any wonder why good police were in short supply. This moral wasteland would turn anybody. Never mind the fact that the great many who ended up here on the front lines were either stupid or borderline sociopaths. And no one had enough righteous fight in them to question why, time after time, someone's cousin, nephew, somebody-in-law shot up the ranks like... No fancy fucking simile would do this truth justice.

So what did that say about him?

Cocky one moment, fucked over the next.

"Did you drive yourself home?" Wendy asked, looming above his body, currently draped over the couch like yesterday's dirty laundry.

Wendy. Dressed in her "classroom clothes." Neat and prim, dark hair tied back, face all sharp and angular, like a rat's.

"Fuck do you care?" he mumbled. It wasn't worth denying the boozy effluence that seemed to leak from his pores, or the fact that his decade-old car was parked against the curb outside, the keys laying on the cluttered coffee table.

Him and Danny and Narcotic's chatty pet-CI had driven out to the county to shoot muskrats from a vacant third story apartment window. Tony wasn't much of the animal shooting kind, but there was enough primal attraction drilling bullet holes in the trash-strewn mud of a weedy river bank.

"You'll have better luck, even-chuly," the CI had assured him.

It was really a wonder that this guy - this guy who made a life selling his body for the next high - had this much faith in life.

Tony felt stupid after that, and he felt even more stupid swearing at his fiancee while lying halfway between drunk and hungover on this nice couch, in this nice apartment, in this decent neighborhood where walking down the street wouldn't earn you a bullet or two or three or -

He hated this city. Loved to hate it. At times, hated to love it. It drew you in, fucked you up, and left you with the tab.


	2. Dwayne

**About this collection:**  
Flash fiction set primarily pre-NCIS in Baltimore.

**Fuck you  
Love, Baltimore**

* * *

**Author's Note: **This one I didn't use any word prompts for. Warning for swearing and graphic imagery.

**"DWAYNE"**

By the time they pulled the aging Crown Vic up to the broken curb, a crowd had already formed around an overflowing dumpster. Most in the crowd were youth, and they jostled each other for the best spot to stand and watch. Other passers-by stopped on the sidewalk to stare, but they stayed only briefly before moving on. An old woman, body short and twisted, her push cart forgotten near an over-tagged electrical box, called out at the police vehicle in outrage. "Over half an hour! What if someone was sitting here dying!"

"Looks like that's our complainant," Officer Rudy said as he put the car in park. When he saw Tony reach for the door handle, he stopped him. "We'll wait."

"For what?"

"For a second car. You know what happened to Willig and Packard."

Tony did know, so he sat back and waited, drumming his finger pads on the dash. Willig and Packard had been on a call solo when an old mini fridge had been dropped on their car from a housing tower. That event alone had lit up the radio for two solid hours. Now there was a two-car policy in place. Rudy predicted it would last two weeks at most. There weren't enough police to double up all responses to this neighborhood and the others that spread over both East and West Baltimore. The department always needed extras for special assignments in the gated communities, tracking stolen newspapers and toilet paper vandals and the like. The Baltimore Police Department knew better than to ignore the hand that kept it fed. Fat and happy, gluttonous for more. The extra cash was always earmarked for somebody or another's pet project. Downtown... it was always about keeping the panhandlers hidden and the dog shit from piling up.

But here in these neighborhoods? There weren't any pet projects. The decay of the public's trust in their own police was obvious.

There wouldn't be any danger of falling appliances today. This crowd seemed reasonably tame, and there were no tall buildings nearby. Just rows and rows of broken-looking rowhouses inhabited by broken-looking people.

"What the fuck's taking them?" Tony asked. He was itching to get out of this damned car. It smelled like vomit and BO in here, and outside, the crowd had already began to fan out, a few of them melting into the surrounding houses. But Rudy sat unphased. "Maybe they saw something," Tony went on.

"Maybe," Rudy said.

Crime scenes played more like street entertainment than instances of tragedy. Especially this time of year, when the sweltering heat of the tightly packed rowhouses forced everybody out onto their stoops or onto the sidewalks or into laundromats and corner stores. It wasn't for lack of AC. Every window seemed to have an AC unit hanging out of it, but keeping it on took money, and nobody around here had much of that.

A second car finally pulled up behind them, flashing its high beams once. Rudy rolled his eyes. "First ones here. It's on us."

Tony jumped at the chance, while Rudy got out slowly behind him, playing backup.

The old woman zeroed in on the both of them, yelling and pointing at the dumpster, "Right there on top! Just like I told them!"

The dumpster stank like death and rotting groceries. They could hear the flies from several feet away. Tony pulled on a pair of latex gloves and went for it. Those remaining in the crowd watched.

It could have just been a pile of rotting meat from the nearby butcher, or a dead rat or cat or a dog, fought to death or used as bait. He wanted it to be an animal. He really, really did. When he touched the plastic and moved it aside, the blow flies rose in a thick, black swarm, and a wave of hot stench slammed Tony right in the face. But none of that topped what he saw, nestled between ripped bags of trash. "Holy fuck," he swore before he turned to the side and gagged.

"Should I be calling Homicide?" Rudy asked bluntly from the safe distance he was maintaining from both the swarm of flies and the smell.

"Yeah," Tony croaked out.

"You sure?"

"Definitely."

Rudy went for the radio while the two officers from the second car were just now opening their doors.

Tony looked at the kids standing nearby, and they looked back at him. What the fuck am I doing here? he thought. He was here doing something useful. Right? Something that mattered?

But these kids had faces that were tired and bored, as if they'd already seen this before. As if they'd seen a man just like him probably not too long ago, standing there - pale and sweating in his cheap, ironed polyester blend uniform, ridiculous hat, pounds and pounds of gear hanging off of his duty belt. These kids seemed to already know that all of this - including the BPD circus that would soon be moving in for an hour or two - was mere routine. Yellow tape would be strung up, and they couldn't use this alley as a short cut anymore. Unmarked cars would show up. People in wrinkled suits would get out, and when the spiral notebooks came out, then it was time to leave. There would be no news crews, no journalists.

No one in the gated neighborhoods gave a fuck about some dead kid found shot and naked in a dumpster. Not if it happened in this part of the city, in this lost and hopeless part. And even if they did, any righteous fervor would be brief. They'd discuss if over four buck coffee drinks, more milk than espresso, or at the salad bar at Whole Foods. They'd post about it on their computers. The cries for social justice would come: Why is this happening in our city? Our "charm city"?

Everybody who lived here knew this as truth. They'd speak amongst themselves because they all knew who the flies were eating in that dumpster, and they all knew who threw him in there, and they all knew why, too. The real work came from within, and nobody in the gated communities knew that in a church basement four blocks up, a young woman who lived above it spoke to a small group about what social justice meant to her and what it ought to mean to them and this neighborhood. But her voice was already marginalized. After all, what good comes from a community that leaves its children to rot in dumpsters? Right? What good can these people do for themselves? That's why this town was run by the gated communities - not them. It's simple. Right?

Tony and these kids could share gazes and they could share this one ugly afternoon, but they couldn't share the same circumstances. He felt like there was some deep and unnavigable chasm between them, and he also knew he was part of the problem, in the faux role of helper. It was all some fucked up song and dance meant to control and oppress, and he knew that even if they made an arrest or two, the problem would remain.

"What're you staring at?" one of the kids finally shouted at him, and it jarred Tony right out of his head.

He still stood right there by the dumpster. The nausea had faded, but the smell stuck in his nostrils.

"Five-oh don't do nothing out here but chase us around," another kid spoke up.

Tony found the words "I know" falling out of his mouth before he thought better of it. The kids did nothing but stare at him, their bemusement mixed partly with amusement.

And then the last words they shared, a steady finger pointed at the dumpster: "His name's Dwayne."


End file.
